Running Cocoon with Oracle OC4J

After testing AXIS , I quickly moved on to check the latest Cocoon 2.1.8 release. I'd tried getting earlier versions running with OC4J but given up due to the xerces, xalan and jdk certification mix - it was hell. Fortunately Cocoon 2.1.8 worked (almost) perfectly first time with Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.2.0).

After building Cocoon, I simply used a manual installation with the standalone version, which simply required $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/config/application.xml and $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/config/http-web-site.xml to include the Cocoon webapp.

The only "fixup" required - and this is for a non-fatal SAX processing error - is to force Cocoon to use the XML parsers etc that are included in the Cocoon distribution instead of the default (Oracle) parsers included in the OC4J distribution. The fix is to force "search-local-classes-first. To do this edit $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/application-deployments/<your Cocoon deployment path>/orion-web.xml. Uncomment the line:
<web-app-class-loader search-local-classes-first="true" include-war-manifest-class-path="true" />

Running AXIS with Oracle OC4J

AXIS 1.3 was released back in October, so I thought it was about time to test it out with Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.2.0). Good news .. all went absolutely smoothly, no frigging about with jar files at all.
Since Axis is a simple web module, manually deploying to Standalone OC4J is straightforward. After putting the web application files in place, register the module in application.xml and the web app root in http-web-site.xml:

1. copy the axis webapp directory into $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/applications/axis
2. edit $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/config/application.xml to add <web-module id="axis" path="../applications/axis"/>
3. edit $ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/config/http-web-site.xml
   to add <web-app application="default" name="axis" root="/axis"/>

At this point, I had the AXIS welcome page coming up nicely at http://localhost/axis/. For the next 5 minutes, I played around with some drop-in web services. Very cool and easy!

Time to test out AJAX?

I see AJAX popping up in discussions ever more frequently these days, an apparent groundswell around the next great thing for solving the perennial issue of delivering a rich client experience over the web. So far I've just been reading and listening. As with all new acronyms, it takes a while to figure out just exacly what the hell its all about. My "Ahah!" moment came after reading an article at AdaptivePath.
I must admit it seems AJAX is more a pattern than a specification, and its by no means clear that AJAX is anything more that a fad. It's not hard to find some interesting and contrary points of view on the web - QuirksBlog for example.
Anyway, after all that reading, I'm itching to at least go for a test drive. Have to have some playtime soon ... and after listening to this webdevradio podcast, I think I may start out with a look at phAtJAX.